Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
The development of the Semantic Web has put considerable focus on data and the relationships between data on the Web. In the vision of the Semantic Web, data should be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries. Relationships among data on the Web should also be made available to create a Web of Data. In recent years, we have witnessed an explosion in the amount of interrelated data on the Web, also called Linked Data. For example, governments have launched major initiatives to publish a variety of public data in open and reusable formats. There are potential benefits for companies to augment their analytics and reporting tools with these datasets. It can provide them with greater insights. As a result, companies will ultimately make better business decisions and generally gain greater competitive advantage.
Nowadays, most large companies and governmental organizations rely on massive data warehouses to store the ever increasing volume of enterprise data that they have accumulated over the years. Multidimensional data stores provide indeed greater processing potential and complex data models facilitating advanced analysis. There is much work on mapping relational data to the Semantic Web. They typically reveal the structures encoded in relational databases by exposing their content as RDF Linked Data. By comparison, very little effort has been made to interface multidimensional data to the Semantic Web. Existing efforts either materialize Linked Data into data warehouses, or directly issue queries against triple stores using non-standardized vocabularies.